Quietly & Safely Insane

Another one from the greatest rock and roll marriage of all time:

Lux Interior always claimed this song was inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, although Wikipedia tells me the painting's title uses the masculine gender (why yes, my post-medieval French does suck that much), which makes me wonder whether Lux and/or Ivy didn't know that, or just didn't give a fuck.

Either way, the song - and this video - always make me smile mightily, if only for the line "it was a naked girl right in my face / high class culture all over the place", and all the little references that always managed to sneak into a Cramps performance.

Also, it makes me wonder about referentialism. There's a surprising amount of music, film, literature, and culture that depends in one way or another on referring to something else, whether overtly through covering, sampling, homage to, inspiration by, or just plain old lifted bits, not to mention reaction to social events and climates, and I often wonder how much an understanding of those connections is integral to our understanding of the end product. The most widespread aspect of this recently has probably been (post-)post-modern cultural processing of "retro", "vintage", "nostalgia", and any other encompassing term to define things picked and chosen from a specific time period.

Now, obviously, the passage of time screens history through different lenses. We remember different things collectively, and successive events colour history in ways that will also continue to change with time. Yet, simultaneously, we see active attempts to define time periods through identifiers of fashion and culture, effectively reducing our understanding to a codified shorthand or collection of symbols. Also, naturally, relevancy shifts and alters, and I often wonder what that means for the nature of depth in cultural media. After all, few general readers pick up the jokes in Shakespeare that, at the time of writing, were politically current... and probably almost as few note the snide digs in Conan Doyle towards penny dreadfuls and "yellow-backed" novels. These are things that - quite rightly, because no one can know everything - become relegated to footnotes or indices, or in-jokes for students of the specific genre.

Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 remains probably one of the most famous Modernist paintings in existence, but I wonder all the same: if you don't know that, and you watch Lux Interior mugging at the camera in a red catsuit and stilettos, does it mean any less? How much is meaning altered by the kind of connectivity that, in literature, we call intertextuality? And does any of it matter?

Thoughts?